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Soccermetrics Connect API: Connecting the World’s Data to the World’s Game With A Soccer API

The Soccermetrics Connect API, developed by Soccermetrics Research and powered by 3scale, is a sports modeling and analytics layer on top of in-match data sources at varying levels of complexity. The soccer API delivers advanced match analysis of data in an accessible form and makes it easier for end-users to create their own customized analysis tools on football data. Data has already disrupted industry and now it’s disrupting sport.

Soccer – or football to most of the world – has been the last of the major sports to witness a data revolution over the last ten years for a number of technical and cultural reasons. It may be the most popular sport in the world, but in reality world soccer is a patchwork of national and international competitions around the globe with little overlap between each other. It has unique challenges in that data of interest to the analytics community is often siloed, inconsistent, unwieldy, or otherwise locked away by providers unable or unwilling to make their data publicly available. As a result, progress on data analytics in football has been much slower than it ought to be.

Soccermetrics, has established itself as a leader in football data analytics – from data models that capture basic events, on-ball actions and player tracking in a match; to research on advanced measures of team, player, manager, and referee performance — and development of data-driven applications to implement both. They have experience developing APIs for their own applications, and have applied lessons learned to designing and implementing their best API yet.

The goal of Soccermetrics Connect is to connect data on the “World Game” to the entire football industry: to provide a standardized platform for distribution of data from every type of football competition in the world to every end user in the world, and to provide a platform for delivery of football data analytics to the world.

The Most Advanced Football API .

The Soccermetrics Connect API permits distribution of rich data at all levels of complexity in a football match, whether a club match or one involving national teams. Biographical and demographic data of players, referees, and managers are captured, with diacritical markings preserved. Venue data include geographic data — not just city and country, but also latitude, longitude, and altitude — as well as capacity and field characteristics. Match data encompass not just data pertinent to league matches, but to group and knockout stage matches as well. But the core of the API is its access to match event data, from the major events such as goals, penalties, bookings, and substitutions, to summary statistics and the micro events that make a match happen — every touch and every movement of ball and player. Soccermetrics Connect also delivers advanced match analysis of data at all levels of the game, whether players, managers, referees, teams, or competitions. It makes it easier for end-users to create their own customized analysis tools on sports data. Averages, expected values, shot ratios, Pythagoreans, adjusted plus/minus are some of the metrics available. Soccermetrics Connect is a 100% Unicode, 100% JSON-based REST API. We’ve built the API so that it has generous hyperlinking between resources, resource documentation through the OPTIONS method, partial resource requests, and sorting, pagination, and automatic response compression.

A Revenue Sharing Platform

Football data has a more proprietary and closed nature than other sports because the only way to gain access to rich data sets has been through data companies at enterprise-level prices — far out of reach of the typical analyst, developer, or researcher. Soccermetrics Connect provides a platform for data providers to make their rich data sets available to the community in an efficient and scalable way, so that developers can access precisely the data they need and suppliers receive attribution and compensation for the use of their data. Soccermetrics also provides an opportunity for developers and analysts to build their own applications or analytical tools and distribute them through the API or an app marketplace.

Current Status

The Beta version of the Soccermetrics Connect API contains historical and statistical data from the MCFC Analytics program sponsored by Manchester City Football Club and Opta Sports. (Disclaimer: The Soccermetrics Connect API is neither associated with nor endorsed by Opta Sports or Manchester City.) In June, they will rollout a paid version of the API that will distribute historical, statistical, and touch-by-touch data and analytics for every match of the World Cup in Brazil. They will have a free tier available for evaluation purposes, and paid tiers starting at $500/month. Stay tuned, we’ll fill you in on the June developments as they happen!

Get Started

The Soccermetrics Connect API is available at soccermetrics.3scale.net, where you can find links to the API documentation and obtain your own API key. If you sign up to access the API by June 1, you will be considered for early access to the paid version.

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